All that farming was obviously a front for something (as it was in Make Me). Sinister silos. Grain! Ha! What was really concealed within? Then again, he often spoke like a farmer, cyclically, in terms of ‘planting’ and the harvest. The annual schedule. He had sown and he would reap. Unless …
‘After anaesthetists, it’s farmers, you know. Statistically. Who commit suicide most often. It’s easy for them. Like pressing a button. They have a lot of shotguns.’
9 HAVING AN ORGASM, STANDING UP
It occurred to me, once or twice, that Lee looked quite a bit like a younger Bill Clinton. (Not everyone can see the resemblance, granted.)
His daughter Ruth had met Clinton once, in England. She had been working over there and she went along to the Hay Literary Festival for a laugh. Bill was giving a talk, pushing one of his books. When I Ruled the World or Me & My Zipper Problem or something. She went up to him afterwards. Pushed through the scrum. Said Hi. He said Hi. Moved on. She called out, above the hubbub, ‘My Dad writes Reacher!’ Sudden silence. He stops in his tracks. Turns.
‘Hold everything! This lady’s father is Lee Child, the greatest writer on the planet. Come on over here!’ She was in.
Turned out the President was a fan, had read them all. (Ruth confirmed the charisma. Irresistible, apparently.) I saw a photo of him reading Make Me too, on a plane, flying off to some international conference somewhere and needing to revise his ruthless, relentless vigilante strategy.
Another time Lee was talking to this cop. A woman. Mid-forties. Worked traffic in New Jersey mostly. Tough job, tough cop, hard as nails. Hardcore Republican too. Loved Reagan, Bush (father and son), Palin, all that crew. Had no time for Clinton at all. Except she had had to provide crowd control one time when he passed through New Jersey on the campaign trail.
The crowd took a lot of controlling, they were all cheering and stomping. The cop thought it was ridiculous and no way was she voting for this guy, no matter what.
Then afterwards he comes up to her, personally thanks her for everything she has done to make his day in New Jersey go so well. Shakes her by the hand. She melts. Totally.
‘I was actually having an orgasm, standing up,’ she said. ‘Never happened to me before.’
Sometimes the myth is real.
This is the kind of research Lee Child does. Cops open up to him. As I say, a little like Bill Clinton.
I checked: no, Obama is not a fan, as such. Lee was invited to some Obama function. The President comes up to him and says straight out, ‘I haven’t read Reacher, sorry!’ Lee liked that: straight shooting, no smoke in your eyes. And he appreciated that the guy probably had other things on his mind. But still. ‘And that’s despite the cigarette!’ Lee had once given him a cigarette, when they were standing together outside some lonely hotel somewhere between speeches. He remains confident that Obama will swing around in the end. One day. ‘Maybe when he retires and he needs the excitement.’ Lee kind of hates it when it turns out someone is not a reader. Yes, the cop was. Didn’t mention if she’d had the orgasm reading Reacher too.
10 STEPHEN KING IS SHOCKED
9 September 2015.
It was like being at a Cup Final. Or a rock festival. Or a riot. There was a kind of hysteria in the air. Tribal passions. When the mob stood up and cheered I had to stand up with them, for fear of getting my teeth kicked in. (What is wrong with you, man?!) I didn’t want anybody to think I was rooting for the other side.
Which is odd, really. Because it was just a couple of guys speaking at Harvard. You’d think it would be reasonably civilized. Hushed. Orderly. But not when the two guys are Stephen King and Lee Child. To some extent you can blame Jonathan Franzen for the fervour. Even though he wasn’t there. Or Professor Harold Bloom at Yale. The opposition.
Lee and King were sitting up on stage together, in armchairs, to talk about books. Specifically one book, Make Me. But they were also fomenting revolt. They were overthrowing an intellectual empire in a way that reminded me of the old Revolutionary war: wild colonial boys versus the masters. Now it is pop fiction versus the literary ancien régime. Were this crowd applauding words? No, not really. They were baying for blood, they wanted heads on pikes, the massacre of the literati. What I was witnessing was a full-blown Readers’ Revolt. It felt a little like watching Danton and Robespierre having a conversation in front of the pro-guillotine Committee of Public Safety.
In the midst of all this inarticulate frenzy, I almost missed the headline news: King announced that he – the implacable author of fifty-odd novels, many of them almost physically unbearable – had been ‘shocked’ by the surprise ending of Make Me. Then he added, just in case anyone should misunderstand, ‘The new one is absolutely fuckin’ fantastic.’ I think it’s fair to say that King is a fan. In his novel Mr Mercedes, the bad guy pulls a Lee Child book out of his backpack; in another, Under the Dome, Major Reacher, ‘the toughest goddam Army cop that ever served’, provides a character reference.
Stephen King had just received the National Medal of Arts. Quite a big deal. It’s like being appointed Secretary of State; you have to be vetted to make sure nothing too embarrassing is going to come out later. Previous recipients include John Updike, Philip Roth, Maya Angelou. The next day King was flying down to DC to have the medal – hilariously massive – hung around his neck, like an Olympic champion, by President Obama. Lee nicely said it was ‘the crowning achievement of his administration’. Only a day or so before, Lee had been writing the sentence about giving Jack Reacher a medal. A strange synchronicity between two writers. A medal for writing. For services to the nation. (I checked: Lee didn’t know anything about it when he started writing Night School; yet somehow, mysteriously, it still leaked into the Reacher story.)
The Sanders Theater auditorium is massive, on three separate levels, with room for a thousand. And it was packed. More people than I have ever seen at a book signing in my life. The actual queue of readers lining up to get their copy of Make Me autographed by the author was not just long: it had strata, like a millefeuille. People at the back must have been in line for hours. They may still be there. I don’t know because I left to catch the last train back to New York (and I missed the train too). That queue was like a giant boa constrictor that wanted to eat Lee.
Altogether mysterious, and if I was Jack Reacher I would suspect there was some terrible conspiracy going on behind the scenes. Turns out there was. Except it was out in the open now. Call it The Revenge of the Reader. Or The Reader Strikes Back. What is Stephen King? A writer of horror stories, thrillers, science fiction? No. He is first and foremost a patriot. Like a latter-day Mark Twain or Walt Whitman, he sings the Song of America. From ‘I Was a Teenage Grave-Robber’ (his first published story) to Finders Keepers, at the core of even his most terrifying works there is (buried in there somewhere, like one of his bodies that just won’t lie down in Pet Sematary) a celebration of ordinary, everyday life in the United States. Secretly, every one of his books is a utopia. A hymn to a brave new world. (Or at least it could be if not for mad axemen, zombies, aliens, serial killers, man-eating cars, etc., etc.) Think of The Green Mile, for example. Even Death Row is a place of wonders. It seems appropriate that he likes to write while listening to loud rock music (notably Metallica and Guns ’n’ Roses).
‘You’re British,’ said King. (This got a big cheer by the way.) ‘But you really know America – I mean, in a loving sort of way.’ Which is
